To Trust a Stranger (26 page)

“I'm going to have to fire Amber,” Julie said numbly, losing focus as some of the ramifications of what she had just seen started to occur to her. “How does this sound? She walks in from her long lunch and I meet her at the door and say, you're fired for screwing my husband. She's worked for me for over a year. I liked her.” “Probably you shouldn't go back to work right now. Give the worst of the shock time to wear off.”

“Take two aspirin, and fire her in the morning?” Julie smiled without humor, then frowned, thinking back. As far as she'd known, Sid had only ever met Amber casually, on the very few occasions when he had stopped by the shop. If there had been signs of what was going on, she had missed them. “She's probably been sleeping with Sid for most of the time she's been working for me. I had no idea.

I can't believe I had no idea.”

“That's how it usually works.” There was a certain rough sympathy in his voice. “How it usually works stinks. “

“Yeah.” Julie was outraged; she was sick at her stomach; she was frightened and sad and angry and a thousand other emotions all at the same time. Then yet another unwanted ramification popped into her head. “I'm going to have to tell my mother I'm getting a divorce.” It was a groan. Mac smiled faintly. “You say that like it's the worst thing in the world. What, do you have one of those mothers from hel1?” Julie tipped her head back against the seat, closed her eyes and shook her head. “My mother is wonderful. She's super, fantastic, one of a kind.

I love her. But-my being married to Sid means a lot to her. Sort of like I won the ultimate prize. When she finds out I'm getting a divorce, she's going to just die. She'll probably try to get us into counselling or something. And she'll definitely drag my sister into it. Then Kenny-my sister's husband; he works for Sid-will get dragged into it, too, and when I still insist on getting a divorce everybody will have to choose sides and
Kenny'll
lose his job and the girls-my nieces swill be destitute and ... “

“Whoa,” Mac said. “It won't be as bad as all that.”

Julie straightened in the seat, clenched her fists and looked at him. “Yes, it will. It will be just that bad.” A lump rose in her throat and she swallowed painfully. “How could Sid do this? When we got married, I thought we would be married forever. I was so happy. “ Her voice broke. Mac's lips compressed. The glance he shot her was unreadable. “You'll be happy again.

Think of this as a pothole in the road of life. You'll come out on the other side as good as new.”

Julie made a disbelieving sound. “How do you know? Were you ever married?”

A hideous thought occurred to her, and the lump was forgotten as her eyes widened. Another blow was more than she could bear. “You are not married now, are you?”

Mac shook his head, and Julie found that she could breathe again. “Not now. For about nine months five years or so ago.”

“You're divorced?” Mac nodded.

“What happened?” Her voice was hushed, as if she was asking for the details of some dreadful accident.

Mac shrugged. “When I got fired from being a cop, my wife decided that she couldn't deal with a husband who was not only an embarrassment but couldn't pay the bills. She left me. Best thing that could have happened to me. Of course, I didn't think so at the time.”

His insouciant attitude hid a world of remembered pain, Julie was sure. She reached out and laid a consoling hand on his jeans-clad thigh. “She must have been insane.” Mac gave her another of those inscrutable looks, and covered her hand with his. His hand was far bigger than hers, long-fingered, broad through the palm, bronzed, utterly masculine. And warm. Very, very warm. Just like the muscled thigh beneath the jeans. Lately, it seemed, she had craved warm.

“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about Sid.”

It took a couple of seconds for that to sink in. When it did, Julie felt her heart skip a beat. She drew in a deep, cleansing breath. There were two ways to look at what had just happened, she thought. One: Sid had betrayed her. Or, two: Sid had set her free. It was Julie time, she told herself as she had once before. Only now, there was nothing and no one, not even her own conscience, to stand in the way of her going after what she wanted. She looked at Mac.

“What are your plans for the afternoon? Do you have any, or are you free?” Her tone was politeness itself But something in her voice or expression must have been off kilter, because he looked at her carefully.

“I'm as free as I want to be. Why?”

Julie smiled. “Because I want you to take me somewhere where we can be alone and take off all my clothes and fuck me until I scream.”

19

“WHAT?” MAC COULDN'T BELIEVE HIS EARS. He had a sudden mental vision of a small gray mouse with a head full of careful plans looking to the left, looking to the right, stepping cautiously into the road-and being flattened from behind by an eighteen-wheeler. His bodily response was so sudden and enthusiastic that it was painful. His mental response was less clear-cut.

“Darlin', you want to be careful what you say. Somebody just might take you up on that kind of offer one of these days.”

“I want you to take me up on it right now. I want you to take me somewhere we can be alone and take off my clothes and ... “

“I heard you the first time,” Mac interrupted hastily, not sure he could live through the exquisite agony of hearing it again. Julie smiled, unfastened her seat belt, curled both long, slim, tanned and utterly bare legs beneath her on the black leather seat-did the woman never wear stockings? he wondered testily-and leaned forward to put a hand on his shoulder and her tongue in his ear.

“Jesus,” Mac said, and drove off the road. Gravel from the shoulder flew every which way before he got the car straightened out and all four wheels once again on the pavement. By then Julie was back in her seat, her seat belt refastened, smiling at him like a cat with its eye on a nice, plump canary. He had a feeling that he was earmarked for the role of canary.

“Don't you want to?” Julie asked, giving him a look that would have melted a glacier. His instant, instinctive answer was, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. He would gladly have surrendered one or more body parts for the privilege. But there were other important considerations to keep in mind, not the least of which was that his original objective here was not nailing Sid's wife, but nailing Sid. Sid was the key to finding Daniel. He was more sure of that with every passing day. He'd just had a major break: he'd managed to access All-American Builders' files from Sid's home computer. Hard to believe Sid couldn't come up with a better password for his business files than Vader, as in Darth Vader of Star Wars fame. Sid used to use that name on a vanity plate on the front of his black Porsche when he was a teenager. The car, license plate and all, had made a big impression on the little kid Mac had been then. The moniker was still as appropriate as ever. In fact, more so. It fit Sid to a T, just as it always had. Like Vader, Sid was corrupt almost all the way through. Of course, most people probably didn't know that once upon a time-Mac had no idea if he still was-Sid had been a big Star Wars fan. Daniel had been, too. Mac, as little brother, had soaked it all up. And it had just paid off Thanks to the finger-sized memory chip he carried on his key chain for just such emergencies, the contents of those files were dangling from the Blazer's ignition at that very moment. As soon as he'd accessed the information, he'd pulled the business end of the memory key from his ring, plugged it into an open USB port, and downloaded. The whole operation had taken perhaps a minute. When he got home, he would transfer what he'd captured to his own computer and examine it at his leisure. If what he hoped was on there somewhere actually turned up, all he would have to do was make a few calls to set in motion the ultimate payback. Of course, sleeping with Sid's wife would be a pretty good advance payment on that payback. The trouble was, he didn't want to sleep with Sid's wife. He wanted to sleep with Julie. Beautiful, feisty, sexy Julie. Julie the temptress. Julie the enchantress. Julie the siren of his dreams. Not Julie Carlson. Just Julie. And that was a complication. A huge complication that he would never in a million years have foreseen. For almost half his life, his goal had been to find out what had happened to his brother. He was as certain as it was possible to be without actually knowing it for a fact that Daniel was dead, and was almost certain that, whatever had happened, Sid was involved. If so, he meant to see that Sid got everything that was coming to him. The difference now was that he was equally determined to keep Julie safe while he did it. She was an innocent caught up in a dirty little war she didn't even know existed. She deserved better than to be a pawn in Sid's game. Hell, she deserved better than to be a pawn in his game, too. Looking at her, all big eyes and lush lips and sexy curves that hid an inner sweetness that was almost more attractive to him than her very attractive outer package, Mac could almost find it in himself to forget the past; he could almost walk away, taking Julie with him as payment, and call it even. Almost. He wanted her so much that under any other circumstances in the world he would have gladly jogged barefoot over hot coals to get to her. And here she was, his for the taking, begging him to carry her off to bed. But no matter how much he wanted to, he discovered to his own disgust that he couldn't just turn his back on the past. Daniel's little brother was still bound by unbreakable ties of love and loyalty, even after all these years. There was Julie to consider, too. To take her when she trusted him, when she thought he was no more than some stray PI who had stumbled into her life by accident then stayed to help her just because she needed help, would be wrong. In its own way, it would be a betrayal almost as bad as any of Sid's. If there truly was such a thing as cosmic retribution, this time it seemed to be directed right at him. If he'd been in a laughing mood it would have been almost funny: after all, the cosmic joke was now on him. But he found that under the circumstances he couldn't summon even so much as an ironic smile. He wanted Julie too much. And, in good conscience, he wasn't going to be able to take what he wanted.

“Hell-o-o.” Julie's tone brought Mac back to the present as suddenly as if she'd snapped his arm with a rubber band. He realized that he'd been lost for far too long in the labyrinthine corridors of his own private hell.

“Remember me?” She waggled her fingers at him in a smart-alecky little wave as he blinked at her. With her legs still tucked up under her and her truly inspiring body turned sideways to face him and her black hair flowing loose over her shoulders and her big brown eyes fixed on his face, she looked like the embodiment of every sexy dream he'd ever had. “I just asked you to sleep with me.”

God give him strength. He was going to need it. “I heard you,” he said with commendable coolness. “You might want to slow down and think about what you're saying for a minute. What you're suggesting here is basically a revenge fuck. And believe me, darlin', if you go through with it you'll hate yourself in the morning.”

“No, I won't,” she said, those eyes going all heavy-lidded and sultry on him. If Mac hadn't been driving, he would have closed his own eyes to block out the sight. “I've got my life back, and from now on I'm going to do exactly what I want. And right now what I want to do is you.”

Jesus H. Christ. If she made him any hotter he'd self-immolate right where he sat. “You're a head case, you know that?” He shot her a grim look. If he slept with her, it would be even more of a revenge fuck than she knew, although it was growing harder with each passing second to keep that firmly fixed in his mind. “And you're turning me into one, too.”

Julie stared at him for a moment without saying anything. “You don't want to? Fine.” She uncoiled her legs, shifted position so that she was facing forward, crossed her arms over her chest and flopped her head back against the seat. Then she closed her eyes. Silence ensued. Finally able to focus on what he was doing, Mac took a deep breath, glanced around and realized that he had turned onto the expressway and gotten almost halfway back to Charleston with no awareness whatsoever of what he was doing. He was heading toward his house, he realized, and at the same time realized why. Take me somewhere where we can be alone .... Such was the power of suggestion-especially when he wanted what she was suggesting so much that he was going nuts trying not to think about it. “Feel like going for a walk?” he asked, searching for an alternative-public-destination fast. “I think we need to walk. And talk. Yeah, some talking is definitely what we need to do here.” She opened her eyes and shot him a look. Forget sultry. Now she looked mad. “I don't want to walk. Or talk. If you want to play psychiatrist, fine.

Just not with me. Forget I said anything, okay? Just take me back to the shop.” Great. Now she sounded-and looked-downright militant. She'd done nothing but surprise him since she'd slammed into his car in the Pink Pussycat's parking lot. There was plenty of piss and vinegar mixed in with that innate sweetness, enough to keep any man hopping. He thought about the sugar down the gas tank, and succumbed to an involuntary inner smile even as he had the unsettling feeling that in her current state of upset she might be capable of any degree of mayhem. The best thing to do was give her time to cool off. No matter what she said, he was not letting her out of his sight. Not until he was sure she was not going to go off the deep end in some hideously self-destructive way. Forget the gas tank. Uneasy visions of her finding somebody else to join her in her revenge fuck danced through his head. “Did you hear me? I want to go back to the shop.” He'd just passed one of those clover-shaped exits where he could have done an easy one-eighty and headed back toward Summerville, and she had obviously noticed. Mac made a face at the windshield and kept on trucking down the expressway toward Charleston. A more specific destination would no doubt occur to him when he got there. Maybe the beach ....